


i change, but i cannot die

by MathildaHilda



Series: What If; Red Dead Redemption Edition [5]
Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Jenny Kirk lives, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Implied/Referenced Abortion, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Micah Bell is an asshole, Non-Canonical Character Death, Period-Typical Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 21:45:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19281796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: Jenny Kirk doesn’t allow herself the luxury of grief.





	i change, but i cannot die

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "The Cloud";
> 
> ”I am the daughter of Earth and Water,  
> And the nursling of the Sky;  
> I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;  
> I change, but I cannot die.“
> 
> \- Percy Shelley, 1820

Jenny Kirk doesn’t allow herself the luxury of grief.

She digs the grave with Mister Morgan, shovels heaps of snow away from the chosen spot, and curses the snow that comes back in the form of small clouds whenever someone steps up to check on their progress, and when a gust of winds sends a flurry of the white bastards into her eyes and inside her shawl.

She snaps at the Reverend, for once neither drunk nor trapped in the haze of morphine, and has the urge to smack Mister Bell upside the head when he comes with his unwanted remarks.

It was a one-time-thing. Nothing more.

 

(She almost does hit him with the shovel, once the grave is neatly dug and soon enough filled with snow, when he has the guts to question Mister Summer’s importance.

Miss Grimshaw does it instead.)

 

There’re no words from her mouth, or on the hastily assembled cross save for the boy’s name, and all she hears is the light and muffled drone of the Reverend’s voice; muted only lightly by the wind and the snow.

She thinks some time later, when Mister MacGuire’s gone – when she sees Karen singing songs by the campfire with a bottle in hand, looking so close to the edge that it almost makes her afraid – that grief is different for everyone.

Maybe her silence is hers.

Because she is so silent now, that it’s a wonder she doesn’t belong to the dead.

 

~

 

They reach Colter, a small and abandoned mining town with wider holes than proper walls, and Miss Grimshaw shoves bundles of bedrolls in her arms while Miss Roberts helps prepare Mister Callander for burial.

While Mister Smith and Miss Karen puts the unused horses away in the rickety barn, Miss Tilly helps Mister Pearson in disassembling the piles of hastily packed chests and packs from the loaded wagons; Mister Matthews stares for a moment before he chases Misters Escuella and Williamson into clearing out as much as possible from the cluster of cabins they’ve found themselves surrounded by, while he himself drags Mister Callander’s pack toward the cabin where they left him.

Jenny knows Miss Grimshaw stuffed her arms full of everything but weapons, no doubt out of fear over what the girl’s grief could make her do, but it doesn’t stop her from tossing half of the bedrolls to an unsuspecting Miss O’Shea, who fumbles with the bundles and drops half of even that into the snow.

They both get an earful from Miss Grimshaw, but for once, and not for the first time since, Jenny simply doesn’t care.

Arthur, Micah and Mister van der Linde returns with a frozen, widowed woman, and Jenny doesn’t think that their grief is equal in any way one twists it around to look, but they’re enough of the same to allow Jenny to not feel quite so alone.

Micah sidles up to her when he’s instructed to get to bed in the cabin, and gets an elbow in the ribs for ever attempting to make something out of nothing.

Yes, he’d _‘had her’_.

But she’d never been his completely.

 

~

 

It weren’t the O’Driscolls’ that shot Lenny.

It weren’t the boy’s fault that Lenny died.

But she needs someone to blame, and the O’Driscoll seems good enough, seeing as he’s blamed for most everything that good-for-nothing leader of his did and done in his lifetime.

“I ain’t feedin’ him.” She tells Mister Pearson once he asks her to bring some stew to the barn.

“I didn’t tell you to _feed_ _him_.” Pearson shoots back, and she makes a face, grabs the bowl, and trudges through the snow over to the barn, almost smacking Mister Smith in the face once she enters.

Dutch’s instructions were to treat the boy to the smell of proper, yet meager, food, and that is exactly the kind of instructions that Pearson seems inclined to follow. Jenny does too, although she’s not exactly in favor of it.

“’s for you.” She says and hands it over, Charles taking it with a silent nod in thanks.

The O’Driscoll boy stares at the stew in longing, meets her eyes, and snaps his head back against the pole, eyes glued to the newcomer among the horses. According to Javier, who’d had the watch the night the horse knocked against the barn, it’d been the O’Driscoll’s, and no one was cruel enough to turn the horse away, even when it didn’t allow for anyone to unstrap the saddle and brush it down.

“Is he behaving himself?” She asks, tucking her hands into the warmth of her coat. She has yet to get her mittens back from young Jack, but they’re of little importance to her when a child is concerned. She doubts she’ll ever get them back whole, seeing how the boy himself behaves around the fires and the sharp rocks and sticks he uses for playthings.

“So far.” Mister Smith says, and holds the food between his hands for warmth. “How’s the hand?” She asks once Charles picks up the spoon to eat.

“Not so bad, anymore. Hurts enough, but not too much.”

“Plenty of snow if it does.” She says, offers a small smile, and exits the barn in favor of the women’s cabin.

John Marston comes back later that day, and Jenny sleeps with her hands over her ears because Abigail is far from happy, and John is too quiet for a man that’s almost been eaten by wolves.

The two are, perhaps, the strangest couple Jenny has yet to meet.

 

~ 

 

She’s repairing the string of her bow when Mister van der Linde calls for attention.

She’s been on one robbery with them, and that went straight to Hell, so she’s not too excited yet to ask to be brought along for another, but she leaves all the same, despite Micah’s protest that robbing ain’t a woman’s business.

She threatens to shoot him if he doesn’t shut up.

Bill only barks a laugh in reply when Micah actually does shut up, and Jenny spurs Minnie in the sides, sidling up next to Morgan just to keep away from most of Micah’s good-for-nothing comments.

 

 

She catches a train with Mister Morgan; one agile jump and she’s barely managing to keep herself from slipping off. Javier topples and rolls right off, his limping form cursing the quickly vanishing train, with a wave of a no doubt throbbing arm.

A skirt might not be the most functional of clothing to wear when robbing a train, but it works enough by catching the men off guard, her sweet smile working its magic, as often as it usually does.

She stabs the first man, and shoots the second.

She would’ve laughed had it not been for the situation, when Mister Morgan takes a shovel to the face.

She pretends the man is a Pinkerton; readies the gun, aims and fires before the train can reach the bridge.

After that, there are a whole lot more guards-turned-imaginary-Pinkertons to gun down before the prize inside belongs to the very worst of people.

In the eyes of the law, anyhow.

 

~

 

Dutch sends Micah and Bill to scout the surrounding area, and she thinks, but doesn’t say, that that is perhaps the unlikeliest of scouting parties she’s ever seen.

Miss O’Shea shoves a handful of blankets in her arms, the former having been given them by Miss Grimshaw, and strides off toward the trees, and Jenny has to bite her tongue to give a retort back, seeing as Dutch stands close enough to hear the faintest of whispers.

Instead, she fumes in silence, and exchanges glances with Karen.

Let Miss O’Shea think what she wants; if Karen mightn’t think much about the girl, Jenny sure as shit will.

Yet it is still not Jenny that Molly confronts later, after the girls’ have all gone to Valentine with Arthur and Uncle and the former has returned with a stolen horse. They both gives each other glances that tells them both that, yes, perhaps their whispers have gone a bit too far, but they are far from as serious as Miss Molly O’Shea makes them out to be.

 

(Jenny does regret the whispers though, at least a bit, when Uncle drags the drunk shell of Molly O’Shea back to camp, and all that is left as a reminder of the girl who had once been in love, is the crimson leaves and the screaming’s of Karen and Miss Grimshaw.

Jenny’s own love and grief, however small it made itself out to be when it first started out, is at the very least not the kind of grief that turns you into the bargaining kind; all of it simply to get a wished response.)

 

Javier comes back with half a round left in his gun, Bill trotting behind him cursing about bounty hunters and burned feet, and Arthur’s come back later to the repeated thanks from Mister Escuella.

Micah’s nowhere to be seen, until Dutch is the one that begs Arthur to travel down to Strawberry and break the fool out and away from a hanging, and Jenny sticks her hand in Grimshaw’s bag for the ‘special herbs kept for special occasions’.

Never again were she ‘ _to be’_ Mister Bell’s.

She couldn’t even pretend that the thing that’d slowly been growing in the belly until she bled it out, could’ve been Lenny’s. Micah Bell’s simply too pale of a fool in skin and mind to ever be allowed to procreate in any way.

She was sick for two weeks, vomiting and bleeding, and was just about strong enough to follow the wagon train to the South on Minnie’s back; the wagons crammed full of chests and packs, before sleeping for almost a full day after the women’s lean-to was raised.

She stares after Jack, her mittens currently being repaired by Abigail when the boy burned the wool away, and knows that what she did was right for all parties; most of all right for herself.

She loves little Jackie, but never could she have found it in herself to love the child that would’ve been born with the name Bell.

She doesn’t tell Micah about _‘the thing’_ that had been growing in her belly. She never wanted it, and Micah Bell had been far from the best fuck she’d ever had.

 

~

 

She joins Arthur, Bill and Karen back to Valentine, playing the lost little girl next to Karen’s drunken harlot, and takes the offered rifle from Bill’s outstretched hand once the focus is trapped between the two young women and the men kicks the doors down.

She shoots the deputy through the skull once the boy – barely a man – rounds on them and the alarm is raised, and spurs Minnie into a full-on sprint and dodges bullets out of town. The mare squeals beneath her, but the bullet merely grazes her, and she has more than enough money now to tend to the wound on her flank without anyone finding bullet wounds on horses too suspicious.

They laugh once they reach their old camp, and hefts fists of cash in the air before riding their separate ways.

Arthur comes back late in the night, mind somewhere else, and she barely sees him smile for the rest of the week. He’s out of camp more often than he’s in it, but she does see him smile again – after the row with Marston about the stolen horses brought to them by the Grays left them both fuming and annoyed – when he comes back with Sean, laughing and smelling faintly of tobacco and smoke.

The O’Driscoll – Kieran, she has to remind herself more often than should probably be necessary – is jumpier than a rabbit in an open field, and she doesn’t understand why until there’s a gun in her face and the despicable boys’ of the Braithwaite woman stares her down with the sort of glee one might see in a rabid animal, and she knows that Kieran had seen something no one else had.

She spits in the man’s face when he grabs her arm, and bites the palm of his hand when he tries to get her to quiet. Jack – oblivious, innocent Jack – listens to the promise of Cain the dog and the gift of storybooks, and remains quieter than the grave on their trudge toward the Braithwaite Manor.

Jenny follows, with barely retained hate, her only reasoning to keeping quiet being the boys’ insistence of the younger boy’s safety, if she only would keep still and be real quiet.

She does keep quiet, for a while.

And then the rage of Dutch van der Linde rains down on the old promise of Southern comfort, and Jenny Kirk has never quite favored the use of shotguns as much as she had in the moment Gareth Braithwaite’s head flew clean off and colored the walls a crimson red.

She almost has the urge to shoot the woman too, but Hosea takes the gun from her before she can.

She can only comfort herself with the woman’s grieving screams, obscured only by the rage of the fire.

 

Miss Grimshaw sticks some herbs in her hand once she comes back, and Mary-Beth gives her a bowl of stew, but she doesn’t lay bleeding and vomiting in the weeks that follow. She sits upright, quiet and hands tucked in her lap, looking for nothing more than to feel something right.

She itches for a gun. For a knife.

For anything that can stop whatever turmoil traps her inside her own head.

The only thing she can find it in herself to do, is hold Abigail when John can’t, and hush her in her own, strained voice, and allow the woman to cry against her shoulder when the pain of losing someone you love so dearly gets too much for silence.

They gave Jack away, but kept Jenny.

Kept her for barely an hour, but sometimes, an hour is all the monsters need.

 

~

 

Jack comes back – oblivious, and young – and Jenny almost smiles.

Almost is a strong word, because all the sounds of Abigail’s joy and Jack’s shrill voice does, is allow her lips to curl at the corners and then not at all.

Not until Jack moves to her, takes her hand, and says thank you, no doubt because of his mother’s insistence. She smiles then, squeezes his hands in hers, and says that is quite alright.

Jenny doesn’t vomit because of the herbs, but she does when she wakes up to the snapping of gator mouths, and all she thinks about are the doors at the ruined manor among the tobacco fields.

She takes the guard until she almost shoots Arthur Morgan’s head clean off, and asks Mister Matthews permission to ride Northwest to the Grizzlies in search of something that could resemble peace.

 

~

 

She comes back not too late.

She comes back too late to murder O’Driscolls’, but not too late for Dutch to push her up the ladder once the Pinkertons’ grab Marston and shoves him into the wall.

She comes back just in time to watch Mister Matthews die in the street, gunned down by the very evils that took Lenny from them, and she comes back just in time to lose five men to a boat headed for the unknown.

She splits from Charles and the rest at the docks, pulling one half of the lawmen from the boats, while Charles pulls the others to the other side.

She doesn’t see the boat leave, but she has already prepared herself for the feeling of loss, no matter the outcome.

She’s already prepared herself that she might not see Arthur Morgan alive again, the bullet he took on that rooftop too close for comfort for someone so recently wounded.

It doesn’t quite hit her until they’re hiding deep in the swamps, and the boys walks through the doors one by one, even Morgan.

It doesn’t quite hit her until she smiles again, and the Pinkertons’ come to take the last, good thing away from her.

 

~

 

She steals her guns back from Miss Grimshaw when the older woman is bickering with Miss Karen, and she shouts back once Miss Grimshaw asks her to kindly put the guns back.

She’d seen the malicious look in Grimshaw’s eyes when she’d pulled the trigger on Miss O’Shea.

“If you’re gonna shoot, you better do it right now.” She hisses, inches away, and snatches the rifle from the pile once she goes to relieve Williamson at the watch, not even pretending to protect her back as she went.

She couldn’t give a good Goddamn about Miss Grimshaw and her opinions.

Not right now, when half of what had once been is long gone and deep underground, and very little makes sense past Micah’s whispered words and Dutch’s plans that seems to have very little ground to function on.

 

 

Marston comes back, one evening when Pearson has very little left to make a decent stew on – the last of their chickens having become the sacrifice for the day – and the scene before her eyes seems to make very little, if any at all, sense.

Marston comes back, and most everyone leaves.

Eventually, before too much can be said, she leaves too.

 

~

 

She makes her way Northeast, far away from the Hollow, and it’s a choice that will forever gnaw at her gut. She’s left before, but never has she left a place so in need of structure and integrity as the gang in the days before it reaches the papers in the whole Goddamn country.

She finds work enough to earn some money, and exchanges the skirts for pants if only to be taken more seriously than she would’ve been otherwise.

She’s a quiet, angry worker, and her bosses soon learn that she’s one of those that shouldn’t be underestimated, regardless of her gender.

She’s the chosen gun, favored above the others, when the wagon trains head to the banks, and it does itch at her fingers to rob it, but the job earns her enough to stay in town a week, exchange Minnie for a stronger horse once the mare is felled by a green outlaw’s bullet, and head out for another job before the week is even done.

She favors sleeping under the open sky, and drink the men at the saloons under the table before nightfall, and she’s more than willing to spend money on the working women on the basis that it’s all simple talk and safety from drunk men who don’t know better than what the thing between their legs tells them to do.

Grace is a sweet one, younger by a year or two, and it’s almost as sweet as it had been between her and Lenny, but she does let the girl go, however, when she hears word about a famed bounty hunter further down South with a familiar name. They write once and then twice, before Grace gets herself a kind and proper husband, and Jenny doesn’t write at all.

 

 

She finds Sadie Adler in a bar in Carlton, the town a small and undiscovered jewel in a county built on coal, and is, for the first time around the woman, shy and almost guilty.

Sadie tells her all that the papers never could. Tells her about the robbery, Micah’s betrayal and Arthur’s end.

Or, what they assume to be his end, at the very least.

Sadie tells her about Marston’s death and resurrection.

There’s very little to tell apart from that, and the numerous bounties Sadie’s become the number one person to locate.

To say that Jenny’s missed the woman, would be the biggest lie she’d ever told herself, apart from the lie she’d told her family.

 

(Heading to America is, after all, a slight lie when someone’s said they’d only be heading into town for a quick peek at the tailor’s catalogue.)

 

~

 

They ride together for barely a year, splitting off every now and again to make room for more opportunities, but they do find each other again some time before Jim Milton makes his presence known once again.

It’s a reunion, and even though she had almost expected a remark from the older man about running away, she’s not entirely surprise when he greets her with a hug and an honest question.

She’s alive, after all. What else is there to know?

 

 

There are bounties after bounties, and Jenny wants the smallest cut of every prize they bring in, not bothering too much in the terms of food and lodging, when a bedroll, an open sky and a forest full of game exists, even when Marston attempts at an unnecessary peace she weren’t even aware of seemed to need an existence.

She arrives some time before Sadie does, pulls Abigail in for a hug and smiles abnormally wide when she finds young Jack with his nose in a book. She even forces Charles into a hug, the man taller and broader than she remembers, no matter how many times she recounts her time with the gang in her mind.

She arrives before Sadie, cleans her gun up the hill when she rides through the gates, and is up on her horse long before the rest of them have finished their stew.

 

(She’s declined Abigail’s promise of room in the house or the barn, should she want it, and has instead taken up her residence, for the time being, at the top of the hill under the tree, where tragedy one day will bury itself snug in the ground.)

 

 

They ride North, and Goddammit if Jenny doesn’t almost wish that she hadn’t left in the first place, only so that she could’ve shot Micah Bell’s ugly mug herself.

“Hello, Jenny. Darlin’.” He drawls, and she keeps her gun trained, posture straight, and tries not to see what she’d seen one of those nights when she’d been too drunk to think straight.

She doesn’t shoot, allows that to John and, to her surprise, Dutch, and helps Sadie up on her horse once Charles limps through the snow.

 

She almost wishes that things had turned out differently, when she leaves both the Marstons’, Charles and Sadie, and heads out on her own.

She almost wishes.

But if she’d wished differently, then perhaps she wouldn’t be alive at all.


End file.
